I was very fortunate to pick this guitar up on eBay at a bargain price. Late seventies / early eighties Japanese guitars are often cited as being excellent quality alternatives to the American original, and this guitar is no exception. It's a Lee Ritenour signature model from 1981 and it plays beautifully. The sound is out of this world and, as you'd expect from a 335 style guitar, it is very versatile.

This Godin guitar was my first 'proper' electric. Mahogany body and neck, rosewood fretboard and Seymour Duncan pickups. It has a great sound and is own vibe - brilliant for many styles of music, in particular more raunchy jazz, funk and blues / rock. I highly recommend these instruments for their build quality, sound and price and you often see them on sale for a fraction of their real worth online.

To my mind, the Wahoo is a true revolution in wah and filter effects, not just for guitar but for any electric instrument. The quality of sound is unsurpassed, the hardware is robust and can be controlled precisely. The huge range of presets are all well thought-out, useable straight out of the box and potentially cover everything you might ever need.

This pedal has seen some action! One of my first purchases years ago, it's pretty much never left the setup. It's an old Japanese model. Great sound, gives a slight middy boost and perfect for the swirly Leslie style sound, Sco style.

The original Zen Drive pedal from Hermida is said to capture the 'Dumble' vibe, producing a smooth, transparent amp-like driven tone. Certainly, this clone of the original pedal sounds great with the gain set low and the volume up, fattening tone very nicely and generating a bit of grit. To my ear it sounds best at low gain settings, allowing chords to ring true and single notes sing, but higher gain is great for searing blues lead. However, my preference for higher gain sound is the RAT sound.

This is one of those classic pedals, the choice of many rock and jazz players (John Scofield wouldn't leave home without his RAT by all accounts, it's saved the day from many a crappy amp in the past). This clone has a 3 way switch to select different kinds of clipping, but the regular old school RAT sounds great to me. Tight, focused and slightly squashed compression... Fat with the tone down, brittle and fuzzy at higher settings. Lush.

I first learned of this pedal through a Guthrie Govan rig rundown. I think, probably as a result of how popular this video became, Guyatone decided to release a short run of these pedals again, having previously discontinued them... I snapped this up. Funky pedal, simple envelope filter goodness all crammed into a diminutive package (it's much smaller than the photo might suggest!)

Scott Henderson turned me on to Arion gear. However, he doesn't like this version of the chorus and swears by the SCH1 instead... I bought this for fifteen quid on eBay, sounds great to me! It can get too bassy on the low end of you're not careful, but otherwise it does lovely clean swirl well and can get pretty nasty on the fake Leslie sounds too.

Very nice delay pedal, in my case used mostly for a general all purpose ambience but it's possible to coax some pretty nasty feedback out of this or (almost) comb filtering. Handy to have a knob or two to grab when special effects are needed!

Ubiquitous delay pedal, great for special effects and the sampling function is very useful despite not having a very long sample time. I used the sampling extensively on this improvised piece http://soundcloud.com/mjkl/1st-one

Plectrums seem to be often overlooked in the quest for tone, but I've made it my mission over the past few years to figure out what works for me. I went down the super thick pick route for quite a while (5mm Dunlop Primetone) but have settled on these two for the time being. The Fender seems to have a more biting, cleaner sound which is great for fusion, funk, blues and so on. The D'Andrea, on the other hand, sounds softer and so is more suitable for straight ahead Jazz.